Why We Say We Lost Someone When They Die

Recently someone said they thought it was odd that people will say, when someone they love has died, that they’ve ‘lost’ that person. I used to think it was odd too…until my husband died. Now I find myself saying, “I lost my husband.”

This came to mind tonight because I wrote in my journal: Oh my love my heart aches for you. The anguish at your loss is still overwhelming.

Of course—this is why we say we ‘lost’ someone when they died. Not because we’re saying death is like losing your car keys and we think the person will be found (although there is that wild irrational hope). It’s that death is loss. Profound loss. When someone we love dies, that means we have lost a part of our life, a part of our self, the part that was that person. I have lost Arthur. I am suffering the loss of his physical being in my life.  

Getting Grief Right

For years I heard about the ‘five stages of grief’: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But when I actually got to the point of experiencing grief these sounded wrong. When someone has already died how does bargaining enter the picture?

With a little research I learned that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross delineated these famous stages for people who were dying, not for those who were grieving.

Thankfully for me not long after Arthur died I found an article called “Getting Grief Right.” The author is a psychotherapist who has had experience with grief in his own life; his son died. Dr. Patrick O’Malley has realized that the “stages of grief” belief has become a destructive prescription for moving on and it often doesn’t allow people to grieve in the way that is right for them.

Dr. O’Malley wrote about a woman who had come to see him. Her infant daughter had died six months before. She was convinced that she should have been able to work those five stages like they were steps in a self-help program. She was confused why she was still sad. She thought there must be something wrong with her.

I cried aloud with relief when I read the words he spoke to her: “The depth of your sadness is simply a measure of the love you had for your daughter.”

Dr. O’Malley wrote that

When I was trained, in the late 1970s, the stages of grief were the standard by which a grieving person’s progress was assessed. That model is still deeply and rigidly embedded in our cultural consciousness and psychological language. It inspires much self-diagnosis and self-criticism among the aggrieved. This is compounded by the often subtle and well-meaning judgment of the surrounding community. A person is to grieve for only so long and with so much intensity.

Instead, Dr. O’Malley says, the grieving person needs to “sink into the sadness.” Experience it. Allow it to be.

I have found myself struggling with the expectation that I should have gotten to acceptance. There has been some self-criticism that I haven’t gotten there yet. A wise friend told me, “right now accept that you’re in a state of rejection.”

Another of Dr. O’Malley’s sentences caused me to cry with relief:

…When I suggested a support group, Mary rejected the idea. But I insisted. She later described the relief she felt in the presence of other bereaved parents, in a place where no acting was required. It was a place where people understood that they didn’t really want to achieve closure after all. To do so would be to lose a piece of a sacred bond.

Those last bolded sentences are exactly how I feel. I want part of me to always be raw and open to the depth of feeling I am experiencing right now; to always be able to experience the depth of our love that is manifested in the depth of my grief. I don’t want to “get over it.” To do that would be to lose Arthur.

Getting grief right is being authentic, being honest about how I feel. Thank you Dr. O’Malley for helping me give myself the permission to grieve however is right for me.

Off Balance

I’m a fairly coordinated person. Ordinarily. But in the months after Arthur died I had some painful falls.

The first was on my first hike after Arthur’s death, early last spring. As I was coming down a series of switchbacks on my way home I stumbled and fell flat on my face. I had my camera slung over my shoulder; how I kept from breaking it I don’t know. But I did slice open my left thumb next to the nail, and abraded some skin on my left hand and right elbow. All in all I was very blessed not to have hurt myself worse. The weird thing is I stumbled on the way up the trail in almost exactly the same spot.

Then ten days later I wrote this in my journal:

Here’s something weird: I’m often uncoordinated, still, after all these weeks. It’s like I’m a different person. I just did a little housecleaning. I was walking backwards dusting on top of the screen and fell over the center speaker, falling flat on my back. The center speaker has been sitting in that same position on the floor for five years. Then half an hour later I mopped the wood floors. When I finished I tried to position the mop in the bucket so it would sit without tipping over, and I ended up tipping the bucket over and spilling most of the water on the office rug and floor. And I still have a bandage on my thumb reminding me of that horrible fall on the hike ten days ago.

These accidents were brought to mind by something I read recently. A woman had fallen and broken her foot not long after her husband died. While the orthopedist was working with her foot she asked him whether this was a common injury for people who are grieving, and, she wrote: “The orthopedist, without even looking up from my injured foot said, ‘Of course, someone who is grieving has lost their balance.’”

In my worst moments of grief it feels like the ground has been pulled out from under me and I’m falling…

A Love Affair with my Dead Husband

My beloved husband Arthur has been dead for almost four months now. Yet, in the last couple of months, I have come to realize that our love affair is continuing. Obviously it’s taken a different form, but the relationship lives on in a very real sense.

Before today I have only talked about this with one other person because I thought it would probably sound odd to people who haven’t lost a lover to death. I know it would have seemed odd to me not long ago. The one person I did share it with lost her husband some years ago, and she was quite sympathetic, as I knew she would be.

Then yesterday I read an essay in the New York Times entitled I Am a Bigamist. The author, Jill Smolowe, is also a widow, and she writes about how her love affair with her dead husband has continued, even in the new relationship she has with her second husband, a man who lost his wife and has his own separate love affair. Ms. Smolowe says they discussed their continuing love affairs before they were married. Because in her heart she is still in love—and married—to her first, dead husband, to be married to a second man means she is a bigamist. How beautiful; such an expansive vision of love, and of life and death.

In “Better Angels,” a lyrical film about Abraham Lincoln’s youth, death plays a major role. Abraham’s mother died when he was fairly young. In the film, Abraham has a very special relationship with his mother, and her death was difficult for him (I assume this is based on fact). His father re-married, and there are some touching scenes where Abraham learns that loving this new mother doesn’t diminish his love for his biological mother.

The most moving scene for me was when the new mother went into a field and met the ‘ghost’ of Abraham’s mother, and the two women interacted in a loving way. What I saw communicated between the two was the understanding that the biological mother had her part in this family and the two women were going to co-exist. After I saw this movie, I thought, “If I ever have another intimate relationship, that person is going to have to learn to co-exist with Arthur’s spirit, which will always be here beside me.”

I am grateful for Ms. Smolowe for this article, helping me understand that this experience I’m having is something to celebrate, a sign of the great love that exists between Arthur and I. Arthur may have died, but our love lives on.